Client

Services

Tools

The client

Since their founding in 1990, Blackout have contributed to some of the largest and most successful events in the UK, ranging from the Brit Awards to the 2012 Olympic games.

The brief

As the premier suppliers in their field, Blackout needed a website which reflected that status and helped to indicate to users their skills and experience in handling some of the UK’s biggest events. In addition to the visual design aspect, the client also needed access to a fully functional content management system (CMS) to effectively maintain their own content strategy.

The response

Initial design discussions centred around the need to update a site which felt aged and needed a refresh. Using modern design techniques was going to be vital in achieving this while a focus was imposed on the use of large scale photography to engage the user.

Site structure was also a key component of the development phase as the previous site had suffered from a confusing layout and technical difficulties, such as odd URLs, which were harming site growth. We decided to implement a horizontal homepage navigation bar with drop downs along with clear call to actions across the site. This helped develop key routes through the site which the user could follow as opposed to finding dead ends where they would simply leave the site.

In terms of the technical implementation of the site, we decided that this was a project perfectly suited to our custom Core CMS. This CMS encapsulates our ethos of clients shaping technology and not the other way around which is so often the case with site builds. For Blackout this gave them a range of controls over the various sections of the site across levels of user permissions.

Core CMS helps to reduce the noise of additional features which may be useless to you and presents a slick and tailored system designed strictly for you.

I was expecting to have a very approachable and professional team working on our project with attention being paid to every detail. That and more is exactly what we got.

Louise Nornes

Marketing Manager, Blackout Ltd

Core’s team got stuck in right from the beginning, ensuring the design and functionality was 100% tailored to us as a business. Core was great throughout the process and we are very happy with the final product.